Hello Guest, if you reading this it means you have not yet registered. Please take a second to Click here to register and in a few simple steps, you will be able to enjoy all the many features of our fine community. Please note that nicknames are prohibited lewd or meaningless (no numbers or letters at random) and introduce yourself in the section for you to meet our community.

Israel, Iran and the Bomb

OPINION
Israel, Iran and the Bomb
By JOHN R. BOLTON
July 15, 2008

Iran's test salvo of ballistic missiles last week together with recent threatening rhetoric by commanders of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards emphasizes how close the Middle East is to a fundamental, in fact an irreversible, turning point.

Tehran's efforts to intimidate the United States and Israel from using military force against its nuclear program, combined with yet another diplomatic charm offensive with the Europeans, are two sides of the same policy coin. The regime is buying the short additional period of time it needs to produce deliverable nuclear weapons, the strategic objective it has been pursuing clandestinely for 20 years.

Between Iran and its long-sought objective, however, a shadow may fall: targeted military action, either Israeli or American. Yes, Iran cannot deliver a nuclear weapon on target today, and perhaps not for several years. Estimates vary widely, and no one knows for sure when it will have a deliverable weapon except the mullahs, and they're not telling. But that is not the key date. Rather, the crucial turning point is when Iran masters all the capabilities to weaponize without further external possibility of stopping it. Then the decision to weaponize, and its timing, is Tehran's alone. We do not know if Iran is at this point, or very near to it. All we do know is that, after five years of failed diplomacy by the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), Iran is simply five years closer to nuclear weapons.

And yet, true to form, State Department comments to Congress last week – even as Iran's missiles were ascending – downplayed Iran's nuclear progress, ignoring the cost of failed diplomacy. But the confident assumption that we have years to deal with the problem is high-stakes gambling on a policy that cannot be reversed if it fails. If Iran reaches weaponization before State's jaunty prediction, the Middle East, and indeed global, balance of power changes in potentially catastrophic ways.

And consider what comes next for the U.S.: the Bush administration's last six months pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together. In other words, one more year for Tehran to proceed unhindered to "the point of no return."

We have almost certainly lost the race between giving "strong incentives" for Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its scientific and technological efforts to do just that. Swift, sweeping, effectively enforced sanctions might have made a difference five years ago. No longer. Existing sanctions have doubtless caused some pain, but Iran's real economic woes stem from nearly 30 years of mismanagement by the Islamic Revolution.

More sanctions today (even assuming, heroically, support from Russia and China) will simply be too little, too late. While regime change in Tehran would be the preferable solution, there is almost no possibility of dislodging the mullahs in time. Had we done more in the past five years to support the discontented – the young, the non-Persian minorities and the economically disaffected – things might be different. Regime change, however, cannot be turned on and off like a light switch, although the difficulty of effecting it is no excuse not to do more now.

That is why Israel is now at an urgent decision point: whether to use targeted military force to break Iran's indigenous control over the nuclear fuel cycle at one or more critical points. If successful, such highly risky and deeply unattractive air strikes or sabotage will not resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. But they have the potential to buy considerable time, thereby putting that critical asset back on our side of the ledger rather than on Iran's.

With whatever time is bought, we may be able to effect regime change in Tehran, or at least get the process underway. The alternative is Iran with nuclear weapons, the most deeply unattractive alternative of all.

But the urgency of the situation has not impressed Barack Obama or the EU-3. Remarkably, on July 9, Sen. Obama, as if stumbling on a new idea, said Iran "must suffer threats of economic sanctions" and that we needed "direct diplomacy . . . so we avoid provocation" and "give strong incentives . . . to change their behavior." Javier Solana, chief EU negotiator, was at the time busy fixing a meeting with the Iranians to continue five years of doing exactly what Mr. Obama was proclaiming, without results.

John McCain responded to Iran's missile salvo by stressing again the need for a workable missile defense system to defend the U.S. against attacks by rogue states like Iran and North Korea. He is undoubtedly correct, highlighting yet another reason why November's election is so critical, given the unceasing complaints about missile defense from most Democrats.

Important as missile defense is, however, it is only a component of a postfailure policy on Iran's nuclear-weapons capacity. In whatever limited amount of time before then, we must face a very hard issue: What will the U.S. do if Israel decides to initiate military action? There was a time when the Bush administration might itself have seriously considered using force, but all public signs are that such a moment has passed.

Israel sees clearly what the next 12 months will bring, which is why ongoing U.S.-Israeli consultations could be dispositive. Israel told the Bush administration it would destroy North Korea's reactor in Syria in spring, 2007, and said it would not wait past summer's end to take action. And take action it did, seeing a Syrian nuclear capability, for all practical purposes Iran's agent on its northern border, as an existential threat. When the real source of the threat, not just a surrogate, nears the capacity for nuclear Holocaust, can anyone seriously doubt Israel's propensities, whatever the impact on gasoline prices?

Thus, instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran. We will be blamed for the strike anyway, and certainly feel whatever negative consequences result, so there is compelling logic to make it as successful as possible. At a minimum, we should place no obstacles in Israel's path, and facilitate its efforts where we can.

MY greatest worry on Iran's nuclear threat to civilization isn't the military option. It's trying that option on the cheap.

If there's any way to block Tehran's pursuit of nukes short of warfare, I'm all for it. Maybe yesterday's dispatch of the No. 3 US diplomat to observe the European Union's talks with the mullahs about their nukes will work a miracle (don't hold your breath).

Military strikes must be the last resort. Even a successful attack would panic oil markets, interrupt supplies to an unknown degree and make enemies of the Iranian people for another generation.

But the fanatics in Tehran may leave us no peaceful alternative. In that case, the most disastrous thing we could do would be to launch an economy-model attack.

If forced to strike, we have to do it right. When safe-at-home ideologues bluster, "Just bomb 'em," they haven't a clue how complex this problem is.

Nor is there any chance that the Israelis could handle Iran on their own (their recent air-force exercise was psychological warfare). As skilled as their pilots and planners may be, the Israelis lack the capacity to sustain a strategic offensive against Iran - or to deal with the inevitable mess they'd leave behind in the Persian Gulf. Israel's aircraft could do serious damage to Iran's nuke program, but the US military would face the potentially catastrophic aftermath.

Without compromising any secrets - the Iranians already know what we'd need to do - here are the basic requirements for smacking down Iran's nuke program:

* Take out Iran's air-defense and intelligence network to protect our attacking aircraft.

* Take down its national communications network to degrade its military reaction.

* Strike dozens of dispersed nuclear-related targets - some of them in hardened underground facilities, with others purposely placed in populated areas.

* Hit every anti-ship-missile installation along Iran's Persian Gulf coast and the Straits of Hormuz. The reflexive Iranian response to an attack would be to launch sea-skimmer missiles against oil tankers and Western warships. The Iranians know that oil's now the world's Achilles heel.

* Destroy Iran's naval capacity, including small craft, in the first 24 hours to prevent attacks on shipping (expect suicide attacks, too).

* Immediately take out all of Iran's long-range and intermediate-range missiles - not just those that could strike Israel, but those that could hit Saudi, gulf-state or Iraqi oil refineries, pipelines, port facilities and oil fields . . . or our installations in the region.

* Hit the military's key command centers in Tehran, as well as regional headquarters, with special attention to the Revolutionary Guards' infrastructure.

* Expect three to six weeks of intense air and naval fighting, followed by months of skirmishing and asymmetrical warfare. And Iraq will heat back up, too.

Screw up the effort, and today's oil prices will double or triple, with severe downstream shortages showing up in a matter of weeks - every oil tanker's insurance will be canceled immediately, even if the Straits of Hormuz remain open (unlikely).

And we'll be in the global doghouse.

Gimme-my-war chumps of the sort who believed "dissident" Ahmed Chalabi on Iraq insist that, if we weaken the Tehran regime by attacking, the Iranian people will overthrow it.

Utterly wrong.

Yes, many Iranians detest their killer-bumpkin president. But plenty of Americans despise our president - yet, if our homeland were attacked tomorrow, most would rally behind him. And we'd fight back. The Iranians would respond the same way.

If a war did spark regime change, the new government might well be even harder-line. Nobody likes to be bombed - and serious attacks on Iran's nuclear program would kill a lot of Iranians.

Yet it'd be even worse if we tried to hit Iran on the cheap, in some think-tank-concocted Shock and Awe Part II. "Precision" attacks - limited to air-defense sites and nuclear facilities - would draw a swift and painful Iranian response against the Gulf's oil exports.

And one last worry: If we decide we have no choice but to attack, we're so casualty-averse that our civilian leadership is apt to put critical targets off-limits to spare Iranian lives. We still want to win wars without hurting anybody, by just breaking the other guy's toys. And that's never going to happen.

If we have to fight, we have to fight to win.

Take down Iran's nuke program? I'm damned certain of one thing: If we start this one, we'd better get it right from the first shot.